Yoani Sanchez Speaks on Venezuela

HAVANA TIMES — Recently I was reading the national press of my country (Venezuela) and I found a brief interview with Yoani Sanchez, the ill-termed ““writer feared by the Castro government” (though I really doubt that the Castros feel daunted by her). In this interview, though, she was talking about Venezuela.

Journalist Andres Correa posed a series of questions to Sanchez – ones that honestly didn’t seem very interesting to me. However, the responses caught my attention.

Question: How did you find out about the death of the Venezuelan president?

YS: I was concluding a conference in Prague when my husband sent me a text message. In Havana, the news came out at the same time that it did in Venezuela. I felt he was saying something that was already known. I understand official language very well. I can read between the lines. I have lived 37 years of my life under a system that specializes in silence and concealment. With the evolution of information since December, it was clear that his outcome would be death.

YS: He’s in a pretty difficult position. It’s a complicated situation because they’re using the emotion around the death as political capital. I’ve heard him. He seems consistent, measured, lucid. He doesn’t appeal to verbal violence, which is meritorious for a Latin American politician. He’s a young man. I wish him the best luck in the world.

Question: When are you going to Venezuela?

I haven’t received any invitation to go there, but if now I’ll be able to leave whenever I want, Venezuela is right there, I can hop over there any time.”

Caracas de noche. Foto: Caridad

It appears that Sanchez, 37, still doesn’t know that when one doesn’t know anything about the topic or the issue they’re asked about, it’s better to keep their mouth shut so that they don’t reveal their ignorance of the subject. Sometimes silence is a means of demonstrating intelligence, at least in this case.

With the first question, Yoani Sanchez fully demonstrated her amazing lack of information about the history of a republic full of constant changes throughout its development and formation as a nation.

The problem is that one can never and will never be able to compare Cuban politics with Venezuelan politics. It shows a great deal of ignorance for a person to believe or even imagine that Venezuelan politics are a reflection of Castro politics, which have governed for decades in Cuba.

Yoani, in the second question, using a lexicon of a fortune teller, claimed that the death of Hugo Chavez was something already known. Then in another question that I didn’t cite (only so as not to make this article too long and tedious) she insinuated that she didn’t believe in the date of Chavez’s death.

Could it be that her prophesizing skills don’t permit her to understand the “truth” about what she seems “unaware”?

But it gets worse.

When questioned about Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, she discredited all great Latin American politicians, regardless of their political distinctions. Yoani talked about a man who has declared himself an enemy of the Cuban people, a man unaware of their existence, a lawyer who doesn’t know the constitution of his country, a man lacking information about Venezuela’s history. Yoani merely improvised with a less than coherent response.

I’m not saying this because I’m against or in favor of the opposition candidate. Rather, it’s because what comes to my mind are those images of the 2002 coup in Venezuela when Capriles abused and violated the rights the diplomatic staff at the Cuban embassy.

However, after reading her interview, I realized the reason for all this. At the end of the interview she admitted to never having stepped on Venezuelan soil, which is why she’s become another victim, another of those people who talk about what they don’t know and simply believe what they think to be the case.

I hope Sanchez can come to Venezuela soon and change her perspective about a country that’s unknown to her. Actually I have very little interest in her political aims. This is for the simple fact that I defend my politics and will not touch on a subject that is for the Cuban people to define – because that’s their history.
—–(*) Wilson Moreno is a 19-year-old Venezuelan living in Caracas.

What's your opinion?

Luis

Man this woman is a pain! She talks utter nonsense and gets away with it! She most likely gets ‘information’ like this with her fascist friends like Jair Bolsonaro, that’s the only plausible explanation.

Moses Patterson

Yoani is no worse than say Sean Penn or Oliver Stone who go abroad to Venezuela or Cuba and speak ill of the US. It is her right as it is these celebrities to speak their mind. Why does she bother leftists so intensely. She is only one woman.

Luis

She’s not ‘only one woman’, she is a exactly a ‘celebrity’ in the great debordian Spectacle of ours.

HumbertoCapiro

Luis!! Is called freedom of speech, ever heard of it??

Luis

And if you understand what ‘freedom of speech’ is, I assume you must respect my right to be an iconoclast whenever I want.

Guy

Yes Luis,she probably wants to be noticed by the American administration.Then she can go and work for them,and continue to spread disinformation about subjects they know nothing about.

Dan Christensen

In the last elections, Capriles, vowed not to end Chavez’s wildy popular social programs that are largely staffed by Cuban doctors and nurses. Apparently no one believed him then. A secret documented, which he had signed, surfaced during the election. In it he vowed to his backers to do just the opposite. Now he implicitly wants to end them with his pledge to end oil subsidies to Cuba. At least he is now being honest, but it will probably cost him dearly.

As for Yoani’s credibility, I recall how in 2009, her story (to a Reuters reporter) of how being briefly detained by police left her “flustered,” had morphed the next day in a horrific “gangland abduction” and a savage beating that left her near death, lying in the street! Her YouTube video, supposedly showed the result of this savage “beating,” but a dramatic close-up of her face showed not a mark where she was pointing. It was really amateur hour! I guess she had never seen the result of an actual beating.

CUBAQUS

Capriles just want to end the unfair and economically incorrect transfers to Cuba. The Cuban regime is paid unrealistic amounts for each of these doctors robbing the Venezuelan people of resources needed at home.

Note: your slanderous attacks on Mrs. Sanchez just expose you for the Castro apologist you are Mr. Christensen.

Dan Christensen

It’s part of the deal to provide lost-cost health care in areas where private practitioners refuse to serve. Capriles now clearly wants to cancel that deal. My guess is he will pay a huge price for that stand.

Your support of Sanchez’s antics (see above) shows you care nothing about the truth. Whatever it takes, right, Paul?

Moses Patterson

Dan, Capriles did not say he wanted to cancel the services. He said he wants to cancel the deal that exchanges those services for oil at exchange rates that prices the oil at a third of its commercial value. He has gone on record that he would pay for those services with hard currency and sell the oil to Cuba, should they choose to purchase it at market rates. Sounds fair to me.

CompayLibre

Dan Christensen just wants lots of cash to go the Cuba to keep his beloved Castro dictatorship going.

That subsidy to the Castro dictatorship is what Capriles wants to end.

Venezuela should invest in local doctors instead of subsidizing the Castro’s indentured labor scheme that violates the human rights of all doctors involved by expropriating 95% of what they earn and that denies Cubans access the medical help by exporting a large majority of Cuban doctors to generate cash for the regime.

Note: your personal attacks and attempts at violating people’s privacy expose you for what you are Dan Christensen. Get your paranoia treated poor deluded Canadian Stalinist.
Keep making a fool of yourself as you have done on so many other sites.

Dan Christensen

Do you EVER stop lying, my poor pathetic little Belgian lobbyist? I expose your lies and you can only pile on more lies desperately hoping to muddy the waters. This just isn’t working for you, Paul. It never has.

Your source leaves a bit to be desired, to say the least. It is only thanks to Cuban programs that many if not most Venezuelans have affordable access to health care for the first time. To Capriles and his fat-cat backers, health care is not a right, but a privilege reserved for the well-to-do. The majority of Venezuelans just don’t see it that way any more. Must be frustrating as hell for you.

CUBAQUS

Unlike you I don’t need to lie, pathetic Canadian Stalinist.
Keep making a fool of yourself, Dan Christensen.
The fact you are again reduced to deceitful innuendo and outright lies shows what a “source” you are.. Unlike you I can document what I post from various sources. You just spew propaganda.

The fact that the Cuban regime receives large sums of money per “head” they rented to Chavez is well documented.

Again you are exposed as the pathetic liar you are Dan Christensen but you should be used to that by now after having been exposed as the pathetic and lying Castro propagandist you are over and over again.

Dan Christensen

Poor, poor desperate lobbyist… Piling one lie on top of another like this is never a winning strategy. It is always best to face up to the facts.

Whatever your dubious sources may claim, when the current opposition parties were in power and supposedly, as you claim, could have paid so little to provide health care for ALL its citizens, why didn’t they? The fact is, they didn’t then, and they have no intention of doing so in the future, whatever self-serving lies they may spew on the campaign trail. Their history speaks for itself. To them, health care is not a fundamental human right, but a commodity, a profit center for their wealthy backers.

Once again, we see what a truly desperate liar you are, Paul. When WILL you learn?

CUBAQUS

No “dubious” sources from me, Dan Christensen.

As always the facts I post send you raving and ranting which in itself is an admission you know you lost the argument.

The only “dubious” and by now utterly discredited “source” is in fact Dan Christensen, you old-style Stalinist.

The way forward for Venezuela is to train more doctors locally and offer them a going rate pay, NOT to pay 130,000 to 150,000 dollars per doctors to the Cuban regime.
In the long term paying the Cuban regime 7 times what local doctors get per doctor will just destroy the health service. That has been proven in Zimbabwe and other countries where Cubans were brought in to break local strikes for higher pay with as a result mass emigration of doctors and a much higher cost due to the payments to the Cuban regime.

As far as the 130,000 dollar per doctor number goes: that is also what South Africa pays the regime for doctors in Sierra Leone as this other source you will desperately try to discredit shows: 24 million rand (2,6 million dollars) for 20 doctors.

Yoani plays to her own constituency: in Cuba, to those alienated from the Revolution, disappointed and embittered by Its failings. Her alternative is not well thought out and never significantly developed, though. If by some quirk of fate, she were really to get what she wishes, it would result in a truly nightmarish world for most Cubans; they would suffer even more–much more–than they have suffered under the Revolution’s many flubadubs. Outside Cuba, she plays to the aging Miami dynosaurs, the angry old guys who watch FOX, the young libertarian crowd, and other assorted political flotsam and jetsum. For once, I agree with Moses, though; like some pronunciamento by Sean Penn or Oliver Stone, why should I take seriously what she says?! Her observations on Venezuela are obviously fashioned by her political biases. She approaches every subject with her views already set in concrete, not open to new–or contradictory–biases. I used to look at Generacion Y, occasionally even contributing to the peanut gallery; now I don’t bother wasting my time. What will be happening in Cuba’s future will be happening elsewhere, with Cubans (like those who contribute here at the HT) who have positive cricicisms, cogent suggestions, and articulate alternatives for improving the Revolution…which is still, after all these years, a work in progress.

Cosmin

Hey Wilson, it’s better for you to take some journalism classes soon. And learn more about objectivity and tolerance. Way to go, Havana Times. Bye!